Clipboard. Pinterest. Erly. Justin TV. Canvas. Turntable. Airbnb. AddThis Indeed: Clearspring Raises $20 Million As It Rides Social Sharing Boom. The name Clearspring Technologies may not be terribly familiar to you, but chances are you’ve often clicked on or at least come across its AddThis buttons, which are plastered on publisher sites Web-wide.
The U.S. -based social sharing platform company this morning announced that it has raised a whopping $20 million in a Series D round of funding led by Institutional Venture Partners, with existing backers such as NEA and Novak Biddle Venture Partners participating. The extra capital injection brings total funding raised by Clearspring to $58 million. The investment comes as the company, which was founded in 2008, is experiencing rapid growth; Clearspring says it is hiring a new employee almost every week.
Socialcam’s ‘Instagram for Video’ Is Now On The Web, Too. Socialcam, the video sharing app that was created by Justin.tv, is quickly fleshing out its feature set.
Qwiki iPad App Hits 250K Downloads In 11 Days. TechCrunch Disrupt winner Qwiki launched its iPad app in the App Store a less than a week ago and after 11 days has hit the quarter of a million downloads milestone.
This is notable for an iPad app, especially when compared to other highly publicized iOS app milestones; It took iPhone app Instagram six days to hit 100K, SoundTracking two weeks to hit 250K and FourSquare a whopping seven months to get to 60K users. Xydo. A new social network launched today around the sharing and engagement of news.
XYDO takes the social graph and turns it into a network of news that is automatically curated through users Twitter and Facebook streams. Think Digg and Reddit, add social news feeds automatically and you have XYDO. Digg and Reddit were two of the quintessential wave of Web 2.0 companies. Podio Is Like A Yammer With Its Own App Store And App Builder. Look out Yammer – Podio emerges with full business social network. When Danish entrepreneur Tommy Ahlers sold his ‘social phonebook’ ZYB to Vodafone in 2008 for €31 million and joined the company, it didn’t seem like he would stay forever at such a slow-moving corporate entity.
Stack overflow. Mobile Messaging Startup Kik Raises $8M; Launches Group Chat And Photo Sharing. Soundcloud. I Can Has Funding: Cheezburger Raises $30M For LOLcats, FAIL Blog And Other Memes. Cheezburger, the internet publisher responsible for LOLcats, FAIL Blog, and other memes, has raised a whopping $30 million in new funding led by the Foundry Group with Madrona Venture Group, Avalon Ventures, and SoftBank Capital participating in the round.
Brad Feld of Foundry Group, Greg Gottesman of Madrona Venture Group, and Rich Levandov of Avalon Ventures will be joining Cheezburger’s board of directors. This latest investment brings the startup’s total funding to $32.5 million Founded in 2007 by former journalist Ben Huh, Cheezburger has grown from a small site to a network of fifty sites that have brought internet memes and tech culture mainstream. Cheezburger’s network of sites has a total user base of 16.5 million people who upload more than 500,000 pictures and videos as well as view 375 million pages and 110 million videos each month.
Chatroulette. Yammer. Appsfire Introduces Live Rankings For iPhone Apps, Scores More Cash. Mobile applications discovery and sharing service provider Appsfire has just launched a new product called AppTrends, which essentially delivers near real-time rankings of iPhone apps based on the chatter on Twitter.
Rankings – currently limited to the top 20 apps on the website – are based on what Appsfire determines are noteworthy items in the App Store virtually in real-time. Appsfire crawls Twitter for links to iPhone apps, regardless of whether the iTunes URLs are shortened or not, and determines which apps are hot and which are not based on their popularity on the micro-sharing service.
Meebo. Tumblr. Posterous. Video: Paper.li adds Guy Kawasaki to its advisors, as investor interest heats up. Spotify. GetGlue. Echo. Echo, a comment platform with a strong focus on real-time, has launched the latest addition to its suite of products: the Real-Time River, which allows publishers to tie real-time comments directly into portions of their sites that are typically static.
Disqus. Seesmic. Dropbox. Flattr. Github. Shopkick Takes $15 Million From Greylock Partners – Reid Hoffman Loves This Company. Shopkick, a startup that’s focused on bridging the real world shopping experience with mobile, just closed a rather large $15 million round of funding from Greylock Partners.
Partner Reid Hoffman, who is also an individual investor in the company, is already on the board of directors.
Square. Hunch. Trefis. Stock analysis startup Trefis has raised $1.6 million on funding from Village Ventures.
The startup had previously raised $550K in angel funding in 2008 led by Timothy Weller, CFO of Enernoc and former CFO of Akamai, Bob Johnson of the MIT corporation, and Semyon Dukach, former president of the MIT Blackjack team. Plancast Plans To Spread Throughout The Web With An API And Widg. Plancast, the social planning service created by TechCrunch alum Mark Hendrickson, is rich with data. It knows not only what you’re planning to do in the foreseeable future, but what your friends are planning, and what their friends are planning. But all of this data has been trapped inside of Plancast. Not anymore. Today, the service is announcing its API. This gives developers the ability to build new apps using Plancast’s data — or to add that data to their existing apps.
Rdio. Quora. Formspring. SuperFeedr. Flipboard. Linkedin. Professional social network LinkedIn now has 70 million members, according to the company’s home page. Stumbleupon. Meebo. To most people, online chat service Meebo is best known for its multiprotocol webchat, but for over a year now its primary focus has been the Meebo Bar — a persistent toolbar that third party websites can embed on their pages to facilitate sharing through services like Facebook, Twitter, and email. That bar now reaches nearly 150 million people per month through dozens of large third party integrations. Last week CEO Seth Sternberg swung by TechCrunch headquarters to discuss the current status of the Bar, and how it’s turning a single ad unit into some serious revenue. We last did a deep dive on the progress of the Meebo Bar in December, when Quantcast figures showed it reaching nearly 100 million unique visitors across Meebo partner sites.
Startups. Wibya. Blekko. Hulu.